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Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) - pseudonym of Guillelmus (or Wilhelm) Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky |
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Poet who took part in all
avant-garde
movements in French literature at the beginning of the 20th century.
Besides writing poetry, Guillaume Apollinaire published semi-pornographical
books; he was an innovator in the theatre of the absurd, and made known
Cubism as a school of painting with his study Les peintres cubistes (1913).
During the World War I Apollinaire enlisted and fought on the front. He described war as a "beautiful thing". "What is new exists without being progress. Everything is in the effect of surprise. The new spirit depends equally on surprise, on what is most vital and new in it. Surprise is the greatest source of what is new. It is by surprise, by the important position that has been given to surprise, that the new spirit distinguishes itself from all the literary and artistic movements which have preceded it." (from 'The New Spirit and the Poets' (1917) by Guillaume Apollinaire, Poetry in Theory: An Anthology 1900-2000, edited by Jon Cook, Blackwell, 2004, p. 79) Guillaume
Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky kept his origin secret,
but he was probably born in Rome, the illegitimate son of a Polish
adventurer called Angelica de Kostrowitzky, a rebellious Polish girl.
Her father had been a colonel in the Papal guard. Apollinaire's father
was possibly a Swiss-Italian aristocrat, Francesco Flugi
d'Aspermont. He disappeared early from Apollinaire's life, and the
future poet was raised by his gambling mother in Italy, in Monaco, on
the French Riviera, and in Paris. Apollinaire loved the idea, that his
father had been Pope Leo XIII. Angelica worked often as a casino hostess in different
cities. Living apart from his mother with his brother Albert in
complete freedom, Apollinaire assumed in his youth
the
identity of a Russian prince. He received a French education at the
Collège Saint-Charles in Monaco, and afterwards in schools in Cannes
and Nice. Employed as a tutor for the daughter of the German-born
viscountesse de Milhau,
Apollinaire traveled widely in Europe. During the summer of 1899 he
went to the Ardennes region
of Belgium. He had a doomed affair with a young Englishwoman named
Annie Playden, who he met 1901. At the age of 20 Apollinaire settled in Paris, where he worked for a time for a bank. He contibuted to such periodicals as La Revue blanche, La Plume, and Le Mercure de France. During his career edited a number of reviews. In 1903 he founded his own magazine, Le Festin d'Esope, and the short-lived La Revue immoraliste. His friends included such artist as Pablo Picasso, André Derain, playwright Alfred Jarry, and the painter Marie Laurencin, who was his lover between 1907 and 1912. At the age of twenty-one he traveled in Germany. In 1901-02 he worked as a tutor in the Rhineland. Although Apollinaire wrote poetry, as a member of la bande à Picasso he was more known in the following years as the advocate of modern painting. He brought Picasso and Braque together, and helped organize the cubist room 41 at the Salon des Indépendants in 1911. A man open to new ideas, Apollinaire published
satirical and semi-pornographical texts, and proclaimed that the
writing of de Sade
would dominate the
20th-century. He introducded the Russian theatre director Vselovod
Meyerhold to the works of the Venetian dramatist Carlo Gozzi, a who had
written the play L'amore delle tre
melarance (1761). In this anti-realistic
farce, three princesses are imprisoned inside three oranges; two of
them die of thirst. The Eccentrics save the life of the third by giving
her a bucket of water. The Prince falls in love with her. Meyerhold
translated the play into Russian and published the work in the
inaugural issue of his journal, entitled Love for Three Oranges. Before the
composer Sergey Prokofiev left Russia, Mayerhold handed him his
journal, recommending that Prokofiev
uses his own adaptation of the play for an opera. The revolutionary
commedia dell'arte opera premiered
in Chicago, on 31 December 1921; it is best remembered for its popular
March. F. Scott Fitzgerald referred to the opera in Tender Is the Night:
"His dream had begun in sombre majesty; navy blue uniforms crossed a
dark plaza behind bands playing the second movement of Prokofieff's
"Love of Three Oranges." Presently there were fire engines, symbols of
disaster, and a ghastly uprising of the mutilated in a dressing
station. He turned on his bed-lamp light and made a throughout note of
it ending with the half-ironic phrase: "Non-combatant's shell-shock."" (Ibid., Charles Scribner's Sons, 1961, p. 202) Apollinaire's first prose work, L’Enchanteur pourrissant (1909), was illustrated with woodcuts by André Derain. The prose-poem depicted the entombment of Merlin the Enchanter. His grave is visited by a number of figures from mythology, folklore and history. They have been interpreted as Merlin's alter egos. From his love for Viviane, the Lady of the Lake, Merlin creates a new vision of men and women. With the publication of Alcools (1913) Apollinaire was recognized as a highly original voice in contemporary poetry. Le Bestiaire ou Cortège d'Orphée (1911), initially illustrated by Raoul Dufy's woodcuts, was later set to music by Francis Poulenc. Alcools was a selection of poems written over the previous 15 years; it contains most of his poetry. Apollinare combined classical verse forms with modern imagery, involving transcriptions of street conversations overheard by change and the absence of punctuation. It opened with the poem 'Zone', in which the tormented poet wanders through streets after the loss of his mistress. Among its other famous lyrical pieces is 'Le pont Mirabeau.' Some of its poems were inspired by Jacqueline Kolb. Annie Playden, an English governess, inspired the Rhineland piece, 'La chanson du mal-aime.' When cubism had become a powerful force, Apollinaire published
The Cubist Painters,
which explored the theory of cubism
and
analyzed psychologically the chief cubists and their works. According
to Apollinaire, art is not a mirror held up to nature, so cubism is
basically conceptual rather than perceptual. By means of the mind, one
can
know the essential transcendental reality that subsists "beyond the
scope of nature." Ten days after the appearance of the book,
Apollinaire
deserted cubism for Orphism. The concept was also invented by him.
Describing the painting of Robert Delauny, he said: "the art of
painting new structures out of elements that have
not been borrowed from the visual sphere but have been created entirely
by the artist himself, and have been endowed by him with the fullness
of reality." (The New Guide
to Modern World Literature by Martin Seymour-Smith, Peter Bedrick Books, 1985, p. 472)
Among Orphicist artist were Delaunay, Fernand
Léger, Francis Picabia, and Frantisek Kupka. The Surrealist painter
Giorgio de Chirico made in 1914 two paintings in tribute to
Apollinaire. In Portrait of Apollinaire as a Premonition the
poet wears sunglasses - he is blind. His
neckties Apollinaire kept in a bottle; Picabia, dipped his brush in China ink,
painted a tie on Apollinaire's shirt-front. In 1914 Apollinaire had a short-lived affair with Louise de Coligny, then with a schoolteacher called Madeleine Pagès, to whom he became engaged, and eventually settled down with Jacqueline Kolb, whom he married in 1918. Disenchanted with his reputation as a dangerous foreigner and thief - in 1911 he had been detained for a week on suspicion of stealing Leonardo's Mona Lisa from the Louvre museum in Paris - he took out French nationality and enlisted in the infantry. (Apollinaire was not one of the thieves, but a casual friend of his had stolen some statuettes from the Louvre. Though he was famous for his erratic conduct, the publicity he gained from this episode was entirely repugnant to him.) Apollinaire fought on the front in Champagne. " . . . despite all the risks I run, the exhaustion, the total lack of water, of everything, I am not unhappy to be here," he said in a letter. "The place is very desolate, neither water, nor trees, nor villages are here, only the super-metallic, arch-thundering war." ('The Paradox of Apollinaire,' Selected Non-Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges, edited by Eliot Weinberger, translated by Esther Allen, Suzanne Jill Levine, and Eliot Weinberger, Viking, 1999, p. 313) Some of his poems Apollinaire wrote in the trench under fire:
"The night is spangled with the Boche's shells / The enchanted forest
where I
live is throwing a ball / The machine-gun plays in three-four time /
But do you have the word /Alas the fatal word / To your posts To your
posts Drop your picks". ('April Night 1915', in Selected Poems, translated with an Introduction and Notes by Martin Sorrell, Oxford University Press, 2015, p. 165) In March 1916, Apollinaire received a head
wound while reading a new issue of the Mercure de France. His medical treatment included two
operations on his skull. Unfit for active service, Apollinaire took a
job in the Bureau of Censorship. Much of his war poetry was published
posthumously. During and after his convalescence in Paris Apollinaire continued to arrange new exhibitions and staged in June 1917 at the Théâtre Maubel the play Les Mamelles de Tirésias (The Breasts of Tiresias, written 1903). It was about a housewife, Therèse, who changes sex and lets her breasts floating upwards as toy balloons. Apollinaire called the work "Drame surréaliste": "To characterize my drama, I have used a neologism, for which I hope to be forgiven, as it does not happen, ofthen that I do such a thing, and I have coined the adjective 'Surrealist', which does not mean symbolical . . . but rather well defines a tendency of art, if it is no newer than anything else under the sun, has at least never been utilized to form an artistic or literary creed." (The Theatre of the Absurd by Martin Esslin, Anchor Books, 1969, p. 314) In this successor of Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi, Apollinaire combined his own sexual obsessions with a retelling of Greek legend and ironic preoccupation with the low birth rate in France. Le Poète assassiné
(1916, The Poet Assassinated) was a collage
of the great fictional poet Croniamantal from his early years to his
breakthrough as a poet and death at the hand of a mob. Apollinaire
composed the work from pieces which he had saved for future use. Its
broken, episodic narrative takes unpredictable turns: "The singing had
stopped, the angry drinkers yelled insults at the bartenders and
against the March beer itself. Others
were taking advantage of the intermission by vomiting wildly, their
eyes bulging
out of their heads; their neighbours would encourage them with a
imperturbable seriousness. Hannes Irlbeck, who had gotten back on his
feet, but not without great effort, sniffed and murmured. "There's no
more beer in Munich!"" (The Poet Assassinated: And Other Stories,
translated from the French by Rod Padgett, Grafton Books, 1988, p. 13) Apollinaire died of influenza in the great epidemic of 1918, on November 9, in Paris, in his apartment on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. The cortège following his coffin to Pére-Lachaise Cemetery included Picasso, Max Jacob, André Salmon, Cocteau, Paul Fort, Léger and many other leading artists and literary figures. Apollinaire entered the army records as "Mort pour la France". "Although he lived his days among the baladins of Cubism and Futurism, he was not a modern man. He was somewhat less complex and more happy, more ancient, and stronger. (He was so unmodern that modernity seemed picturesque, and perhaps even moving, to him.) He was the "winged and sacred thing" of Platonic dialogue; he was a man of elemental and, therefore, eternal feelings; he was, when the fundaments of earth and sky shook, the poet of ancient courage and ancient honor." (Jorge Luis Borges, p. 313) Experimental Calligrammes (1918), Apollinaire's poetic record of his war experiences, came out a few months before his death. André Breton, Tristan Tzara, Paul Éluard, and Louis Aragon and other poets of the younger generation took up its call to investigate new worlds of expression. Cubism left its marks on several literary works and authors. Max Jacon, André Salmon, Pierre Reverdy, and Gertrude Stein were intimately connected with the cubist painters. In prose, critics have seen cubist aesthetics in André Gide's novel Les Fauxmonnayeurs (1925). Apollinaire's stature has continued to grow since his death, as the precursor of surrealism and as a modernist poet. The Breasts of Tiresias was made into an opera (1947) by Francis Poulenc.
Selected works:
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